Book Review - UnPlanned by Abby Johnson

I had this book on the shelf for several months now. To be honest, I sort of avoided it because I suspected the sorts of things it would contain - dark & dreadful things. I had read & heard a lot about abortion methods, the anguish of the child, the harm caused to women, the botched procedures, etc. But I was certainly not ready to deal with the level of grief going on in the mind & soul of a woman who spent almost a decade on the “other side of the fence.” Because Abby begins with the pivotal moment of her career as an abortion clinic director, I admit my throat had a lump in it & I was ready to weep just a few pages in. But I just couldn’t stop reading. It was getting late, but just one more page… Soon, I had covered over 200 pages & it was almost one in the morning, so I headed off to bed. Curiously, I slept like a baby.


Several things strike me about her account that I feel compelled to share…

- The complexity of the human being. It is all too easy to paint people with whom you disagree as one-dimensional beings. All of us are complex knots of conflicts & contrasts. We easily compartmentalize our lives, & so easily dupe ourselves or allow others to do so. I do it. You do it. Abby points that all the while she worked at P.P., she thought she was doing good for women. We should be very humble before the mystery & complexity of the human person, especially in their fallen state.

- The complexity of human relations. In light of the above, when approaching others to convince them of the evil of abortion, we need to approach them with great, great care. If, as pro-lifers, our motivation, message, or means is anything other than the love of human beings, we will fail. Abby was loved by her parents & husband, though they strongly disagreed with her. She was openly loved by many on the other side of the fence. Yet those to whom she was loyal within P.P. turned viciously against her the second her intention to leave was discovered. In all human relations, with friend or foe, cultivate love.

- The complexity of man before God. It is a colossal scandal before the world that some Christian denominations are either neutral on the matter of abortion, & God please forbid, even pro-abortion. Abby was raised in a Christian home, never considered herself anything but a seeker of God, & was very conflicted when she was asked to leave her evangelical church because she worked for P.P., & saddened again when she was encouraged to leave her Episcopalian church because she left them. All the while she was searching God’s will in her life. And yet she still worked where she did. As mentioned, we can convince ourselves of nearly anything. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, we don’t need the Church to be right when we are right, but rather when we’re wrong.

- Good triumphs over evil. This is only true if there is something that really is good & something that really is evil. I am pro-choice when picking pizza toppings - this is a matter or pure preference of little moral concern. But if we are talking life issues, a choice is always between things more or less morally right & good. Part of speaking the Gospel of Jesus Christ is simply convincing people that there is a right & a wrong, a good & an evil, completely independent of how we feel about it or the circumstances. When facing such a horrible thing as abortion & the many other violations of human dignity, we should foremost know that the pro-life cause is a godly cause. God is pro-life because life is good; therefore, in faith we can be assured of victory.

What conclusions might we draw from Abby’s story? What can we do to end this tragedy in our day?


- Be loving & kind to everyone you meet. You never know how God will one day use a kind look or smile or word as a point of grace to change someone’s heart. We all remember something in our past who brought us unexpected grace.

- Never write off anyone. This is a corollary to the above. Some of the greatest sinners have become the greatest saints. Faith & conversion are mysterious happenings. Some people are born with faith, others are converted in a flash, but many people take time to work it all out. Every human being that ever existed was & is called to union with God; never cease to hope for this.

- Persevere. Babies take time to develop & people’s minds & hearts take time to change. The continuous, patient, loving presence of pro-life people through all days, seasons, & years must be a part of the landscape. It is easy to give up hope in the glacial pace of legislative change. We may lose ground any given day, but we certainly lose all if we retreat from the field of battle. The good news is that great numbers of young people are embracing the life message. The tide may be turning. Fortitude.

- Pray & fast. Though practical action is required, ultimately, this is a spiritual battle. Rather than trusting in our own abilities & righteousness, this mission will only be successful to the degree that we turn it over to God & trust the task of saving life to Him who created it.

- Stay informed. Thing happen really fast these days. You need to know if P.P. is planning to open a clinic in your town. You need to know about legislation being introduced into state or federal legislatures. Access to good information is key. Your local Right to Life chapter or your parish’s pro-life committee can be a clearing houses for what’s going on locally. The web can connect you to things going on nationally.

- Don’t assume others are taking care of it. Your church has people that take care of the flowers in the sanctuary. You don’t have to worry about it; it just happens. Your church also has people that pray outside of the abortion clinics & distribute information. You don’t have to worry about that, someone is taking care of it, right? Dead wrong. We do not have the luxury of assuming other people are going to do this work for us. If every Christian participated, this horror would already be over.

- Get involved & take action.  Participate in the pro-life events in your area, whether through your church, the local Right to Life office, or 40 Days event. Learn enough to offer others compelling arguments about why abortion is wrong & not a personal matter for the mother alone. Know your state & federal representative’s positions on life issues. Write them (respectfully!) to let them know your pro-life views & that you expect them to do their part to uphold human life, which is rightly placed first among the self-evident truths declared in the Declaration of Independence.

Abby Johnson’s story is a great one that should be widely known, a story of hope.  Read it & recommend it others. Donate a copy to your parish library. I can’t imagine myself being willing to systematically examine my own history, thoughts, & beliefs in the way Abby had done, let alone share it with the world. This was a monumental work of courage that she attributes solely to the power of God. It will change hearts & save lives. A million thanks, Abby, for telling your story.
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In the Beginning by J. Cardinal Ratzinger - Epilogue, Part II

Epilogue: Consequences of Faith in Creation, Part II

The next figure Cardinal Ratzinger considers after Bruno, Galileo, & Luther is Wilhelm Hegel, who saw God as the “process of reason (p.89),” where sin, grace, & personal salvation all evaporate before the emergence of a new humanity that pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak.  If Hegel proposed this as a theory, Marx made it a reality: “Redemption is now construed strictly as the ‘praxis’ of man… the total antithesis of faith in creation (p.90).”  Ratzinger notes two aspects of Marx’s scheme.  Firstly, the individual no longer matters; only the whole.  “Individual consciousness [& suffering] is taken up into class consciousness… All that matters is the logic of the system… a future in which humans are redeemed by their own creation work (p.91).”  A cheery prospect, no?  G.K. Chesterton in his book What’s Wrong with the World calls this not the bravest, but the most cowardly ideology of all: ever gazing toward a perfect future that never seems to arrive.  Secondly, Marx says a creation ordered toward another is dependency & weakness.  It is man that must create his own universe & destiny through work.  The Marxist is utterly forbidden to ask where the universe came from, to what it is ordered, & how man finds his place it in.  Collectivism promises freedom, but the first thing it eliminates is the freedom to ask a question.  In denying the question, it also denies the truth that answers it.  Disguised as work, Marxism admits only contempt for both man & creation.

Based on these historical observations, Ratzinger says belief in creation these days is obscured & denied three main ways: scientific rationalism, radical environmentalism, & a view of creation as hostile to grace.  The first false view would reduce creation to simply a thing to be examined through microscope & telescope, mere matter to be manipulated.  What is beyond empirical observation is “dismissed as meaningless (p.92).”  Matter has no questions to ask, no morality to struggle with, nor hopes or desires to pursue; all that remains is what science can do.  In such a view, all that is definitively human is swept aside.  Yet, isn’t every aspect of human life inseparably linked to questioning & decision making as to what it right, what it true?  Science by itself separates man from his anchor in the truth; substituting a false god of progress.

The second trend against creation we are seeing more & more today is the idolatry of radical environmentalism: the view of man “as the disease of nature (p.93).”  Even the old pagans that worshipped the earth believed that man had a place on it.   This environmentalism views the human intellect as the source of the damage, so it is a highly anti-intellectual movement.  Further, it is self-hatred of the gift that is human life.  It is ultimately a nihilism in which man finds no grace, no future, & no redemption.

The third false understanding of creation would not permit it to be redeemed by God; it remains an irredeemably corrupted obstacle for man.  Ratzinger recalls Paul’s words, “It is not the spiritual that is first but the physical, and then the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46) (p.94),” indicating that grace & creation are two poles of the Christian Faith that must never be set against one another.  Indeed, the Christian view sees creation as the gateway to the world as grace.  Understanding God as lover presupposes faith in God as creator.  Ratzinger calls this “the freedom to accept myself as well as the any other member of the Body of Christ…  it is a way of saying ‘Yes’ (p.95)” to the gift of God.

In his conclusion, Ratzinger proposes that ultimately there are really only two philosophies of creation: the Gnostic model & the Christian model.  “Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, [is] the repudiation of creation (p.p.96).”  Here, God’s redeeming love seems too shaky a ground on which to found our lives; it is not something we can force & control.  On the contrary, in humility & dependence the Christian receives a redeemed creation as a gift & a promise from the God who entered his own creation to save us.  The Gnostic option is, in fact, hostile to God as it aims “at power through knowledge… [it] will not entrust itself to a world already created, but only to a world still to be created.  There is no room for trust, only skill (p.97).”

The Christian truth is exactly opposite: man is dependent.  In acknowledging this, he rejects every attempt to create himself & his world from within.  However, “there is nothing degrading about dependence when it takes the form of love… for only love transforms dependence into freedom (p.98-99).”  The center of man’s redemption is Jesus Christ, the God-man, hanging on the cross.  Thus, “the doctrine of creation is, therefore, inseparably included within the doctrine of redemption (p.99),” which must be proclaimed to prevent the reduction of man to just another animal in nature & the redemption of man as the future we can build by our own powers.  With a proper understanding of the Incarnation & the Resurrection, man finds the truth of God & himself within a genuinely Christian understanding of creation.

In the Beginning by J. Card. Ratzinger - Epilogue Part 1

Epilogue: Consequences of Faith in Creation, Part 1

We have seen that faith in creation & the Father’s plan for mankind are inextricably bound together. However, in an appendix to his four homilies on creation, Cardinal Ratzinger notes that much of the Church’s recent theology has been directed toward “doing,” which sets aside the study of creation as something “not sufficiently practical.” “Theology has been seeking its truth more and more ‘in praxis’; not in the apparently unanswerable problem, ‘What are we?’, but in the more pressing, ‘What can we do?’ (p.80)”

Certainly, the world threatens God’s creation with ever-new movements & projects, all of which ultimately are philosophic in nature. Card. Ratzinger begins to examine these movements by noting that creation and nature must now “defend themselves against the limitless pretensions of human beings as creators. Human beings want to understand the created world only as material for their own creativity.” In this, “humans are sawing off the branch on which they sit (p.81).” Man’s salvation is intrinsically tied up with a proper understanding of creation, so it cannot be culled out of any plan to achieve man’s proper end. Ratzinger will now introduce a series of historical figures that mark various antithetical stances against a properly Christian view of creation.

First, we find Giordano Bruno (d.1600), a fallen-away Dominican who posited the idea of God-as-cosmos. We might wonder, if Bruno so elevated creation to divinity, how is his view antithetical? He desired to “relinquish the Christian so that the Greek could be restored in all its pagan purity (p.81).” However, Christian creation is contingent; it is dependent on the divine. Many moderns have taken the next step to claim that “the dependence implied by faith in creation is unacceptable… [As] a real barrier to human freedom [it is] the first thing needing to be eliminated if humankind is to be effectively liberated (p.82).”

Ratzinger also sees in Galileo (d.1642) a return to Greece, but this time in a Platonic movement of God-as-mathematics. Discovering the formulae that correctly describes the function of the universe is to approach the divine. “The whole of knowledge is fitted into the schema of subject and object. What is not objective is subjective. [And] the subjective is everything arbitrary and private, everything outside of science… unworthy of knowledge (p.84).” In this structure, God is reduced to being merely “the first cause,” which is detached from & unaffected by - even unaffecting of - the universe. Attempting to split the God who created the cosmos from the God who created you is lethal to both man & God. He is not God who merely dwells in the outer sphere of the universe, nor is he God who dwells only in the inner world of human piety, for in God ”creation and covenant come together (p.85).” Here Ratzinger gives an interesting, but undeveloped, idea that human beings are actually “an obstacle and irritation for ‘science’ (p.86),” as they cannot easily be “objectified.” He spies a way out of this modern mire, however: by seeing the person not just as another object in nature to study & ‘figure out,’ but in the light of God, the creator.

If Bruno & Galileo sought to break apart the Christian synthesis of Athens & Jerusalem, but keeping only the Greek, then Martin Luther (d.1546) would also seek to split the two minds, but so as to abolish the Greek entirely to rediscover a “pure” Christianity. In doing so, the cosmos became for Luther a fallen creation for fallen man: “the burden of their past, their shackles and chains, their damnation: Law (p.87).” Here, in an ironically Platonic twist, Luther stretches man between being & nothing: only insofar as his soul attains to God does he have any existence whatever; considered in himself, man is nothing, a non-being. In this scheme, “Grace is seen here in radical opposition to creation, which is marked through and through by sin; it implies an attempt to get behind creation (p.88).” This philosophy naturally breeds dualism, which sets the spirit against the flesh. Ratzinger sees this dualism developing in the modern world along two lines: one of “divine geometry” and one of “intrinsic corruption.” We will see how Ratzinger concludes this line of thought next time.

Postscript: In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger introduces the topic of worship in general by proposing the ideas of the descending & the ascending, the going away from & the returning to. He proposes that many, if not most, religions of the pre-Christian/Judeo ancients rightly saw divinity as the pure state from which all material things fell & to which they seek to return. In other words, creation was a disaster, a tragedy. Though surely unintended, Luther in his doctrine of the utter depravity of man has, in fact, brought in a classic pagan principle, albeit in a Christianized version – the physical order as the result of a complete fall from the divine order, and from which we must separate ourselves if we are to return to the state of divine grace. The Catholic tradition, in great contrast, sees creation as a wondrous gift to be celebrated, enjoyed, & cherished; a great good from the God that looked over his work & pronounced it good.

Short Thoughts on 2011

Into Great Silence

I spent New Year’s Eve watching the documentary about the Carthusian monks at the Grande Chartreuse monastery while fireworks boomed off in the distance. It was wonderful. Other than singing the chants of the liturgy, the monks are only allowed to talk during the occasional outdoor recreation. They were discussing a hand washing routine, and some were questioning whether it was of any use. After some debate, one monk said that their entire way of life was a symbol; if there seemed to be a problem, they should examine themselves, not the symbols. Prayer is the pathway to God, and noise & distraction obscure the path. Silence is not a lack of noise, but rather something positive, an unlimited potential that connects us directly to God. Noise is not a possibility at all, but a limitation to something constricting & useless; it is the deprivation of silence. I want more silence in my life. Maybe this will become a tradition.


Monks with Brooms

Those cats were Kung Fu fighting. Not really fast as lightning, though. I’m surprised the whole place wasn’t struck by divine wrath & burnt to the ground. I don’t know anything about the relationship between the Armenians & the Greeks, but I don’t have to. This sort of thing should be impossible for anyone calling themselves a disciple of Jesus Christ. Msgr. Charles Pope has a good discussion of this & his personal experiences with the Greeks at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem here. In my discussions with non-believers, I find that the worldly, sinful, & scandalous behavior of Christians is at or near the top of the list of reasons they give for not believing. The hatred that was and continues to be promulgated at the Church of the Nativity was not of God.

Kim Kardashian’s Not-a-Wedding

Just another log on the funeral pyre of marriage as instituted by God and upheld by natural law, at least in the West. If a validly-contracted marriage between one man & one woman isn’t permanent & exclusive, there’s no need to bother with it at all, other than as a facade for whatever personal meanings people wish to fill its empty husk. Unfortunately, this is not a “you-do-what-you-want-&-I’ll-do-what-I-want” sort of thing: marriage & the family are the building blocks of society. As marriage goes, society goes. Is going? Gone? Maybe not completely just yet. We often forget the carnage done to families & the individual souls that are at stake. The Church has the burden to remind humanity the forgotten truths of the marriage vow, despite individual Catholics’ own complicity in this crime of humanity. I feel a terrible burden to teaching these hard truths to my 6th grade kids; I know that failed marriages & fatherless families are already a part of their lives. I wish they could see how evil & destructive all of this is & that they would be the generation to finally stand & say, “Not us!”

Pro life Victories

Somehow, despite the utter moral failing of America (see above), there seems to be an increase in the understanding that babies in the womb are still babies, therefore deserving of love & care due any child. I think science has helped us here – images of children in the womb show them as little persons with fingers & toes, not the “blobs of tissue” that we’ve been told they were for so long by the abortion establishment. Did you know a baby’s heart begin beating after just 21 days or so? That’s incredible! I think most of us would say something with a beating heart of its own was a living being. And most intelligent people would note that this being is not a developing toaster, or an ostrich, or a Tonka truck, but a human being. The science speaks for itself; the abortion community has itself conceded this point, & shifted the argument to that the rights of the mother to be unencumbered as mothers trump those of their unborn children.

There have been a great number of pro-life victories around the country in state legislatures this past year: implementing high(er) information & medical standards on facilities, closing down those that don’t comply, & even prosecuting negligent & abusive abortionists (what a statement!). This is wonderful, because it isn’t just an elite few that have forced its view on the masses - which is how the permissive laws were enacted originally - but a real grassroots movement of ordinary people who believe that babies are good & it isn’t right to kill them; nor is there a dreamed-up right to kill them. Be aware, though, that there is already a rising tide of back lash amongst the “reproductive rights” brigade, and we are in for a lengthy legal & cultural battle which will demand our stamina & resources. These groups are viciously determined & have deep pockets. We already see this with the health insurance mandates that seem purpose designed to stab at the heart of Catholic institutions. We also need to be on the lookout for flank attacks by some wacky strains of environmentalist for whom humans are as lice on the beautiful head of mother earth – the fewer the better. But the good news is that every human being by the fact of being alive themselves innately knows the value of human life, and this, ultimately, will win the day. Unlike “reproductive rights,” the right to live is not granted or repealed by presidents, legislators, courts, or public opinion, but by God.

Wishing all a blessed 2012!